Chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has started a campaign, Waste Not Want Not, hilighting the shocking extent to which food is wasted in the UK and is urging us all to think about what we can do to waste less.
Regular readers of this blog will know that food waste is one of my biggest bugbears and that I rant about it quite regularly. It infuriates me that supermarkets take no responsibility for the waste they cause in the supply chain and demand cosmetic standards which sees farmers ploughing tons of vegetables back into the soil or into landfills.
In a TV documentary this week, Hugh visited one such farm where the family who have been growing parsnips since the 1970s now operate at a loss due to the huge waste of produce which is being rejected by Morrison's supermarket.
I don't want to bang on about statistics such as us here in the UK we are throwing around 15 million tonnes of food and drink away a year, because clearly this is making no impression upon people. Hugh challenged a woman on the documentary who was throwing some perfectly edible ingredients into her dustbin, dictated purely by use-by dates, but she clearly saw no shame in not using common sense or having any ethics, it's all easy come-easy go and cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing!
I have recently re-read Angela's Ashes, a memoir written by Frank McCourt about his impoverished childhood in the 1930s, the same era my parents grew up in. Like McCourt, my parents often wondered where their next hot meal was coming from and often subsisted on bread and tea, McCourt's family were literally starving most of the time and resorted to stealing leftover food from the bins of restaurants at the end of the day. Fast forward a couple of generations and we're gaily chucking away a day's worth of good food every week per household.
Many people today seem perfectly happy to ignorantly remain at the end of an industrial food chain without a care in the world about it. To assume any responsibility about what we are eating without 'professional' guidance seems unachievable nowadays, we seem incapable of smelling food or trusting our instincts, something generations before us did with notable success. Of course the food corporations and supermarkets are relying on our greed and stupidity, it would be seriously unprofitable for them if we had any nouse.
I don't even really want to bother you yet again with the horror of intensely farmed chickens, however, the fact that these creatures are subjected to such a cruel fate from birth to death and then restaurants like KFC toss a couple of million of them in the bin every year makes me feel sick to my stomach.
I would urge you to think about your contribution to waste, blitz ageing vegetables into a delicious soup, freeze meat that's approaching its use by date, grate cheese and freeze it in bags to use for cooking, sauté mushrooms over a low heat, extract all the juice then cool and freeze
There are many ways to use up ingredients past their best and I shall continue to share tips and recipes in forthcoming posts.
Please sign Hugh's pledge at www.wastenotuk.com
And remember, next time you're hungry do the apple test: if you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, you're not hungry. This will make you think twice about all the unnecessary extras you buy to snack on.
'We are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.'
- Michael Pollan
Love Donna xxxxxxx
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